John kept his eyes on Terkal as Undine covered him in her healing goo. It had a healthy green tinge, different from her normal body, and recovered that which Gnome’s first aid couldn’t. It had been fortunate that the soil elemental had been the one to find him, otherwise they would have had to carry the guy to Undine while he was bleeding out, and without the ocean elemental around, John’s engagement with Abraham would have gone even worse.

Following Abraham’s flight, the Gamer and his allies had attempted to catch a few Fateweavers or whatever stragglers were left behind. In the latter endeavour, they were exactly not successful, some secret signal tempting every remaining loyalist to flee in the same moment. With the Fateweavers, they had a bit more luck.

Being the last ones to exit, having to secure their allies’ retreat, John and his allies had a couple of seconds more to pick them off and, since the barrier experts had only relatively recently stopped working for the wider non-combat guild and were now integrated into the armies, their combat experience was somewhat lacking. What that resulted in was a desynchronized exit from this barrier, in turn leading to the last two of the six Fateweavers losing control of the Protected Space to the Gamer, preventing their leave.

They had been taken captive, hands tied together, and were kept elsewhere. In this miraculously unharmed office room were only John, his girls, the generals and their surviving upper staff. In total, there were only 200 people remaining. Abyssal armies were small, so this wasn’t too disheartening.

People were getting healed and otherwise rested. While leaving a barrier did restore the body to a healthy state, Gaia’s way to prevent people that were beaten to an inch of their life appearing in the streets, there were some limitations that came with that. The supreme deity wasn’t about to let herself be used as a cheap way to heal, after all.

If one entered the same barrier one had been wounded in within a small time frame, around 24 hours, the wounds would simply appear again. Taking a particular grievous injury and entering even another barrier within an hour would also cause it to reappear partly healed, depending on the length of the gap. In the case of such things as separated limbs, Gaia varied between creating a healed stump or afflicting the arm with some sort of disease that basically caused it to go necrotic within a few weeks as if it was a natural cause, all depending on the circumstances.

Even the healing that did occur was only for physical wounds. Unseen effects, not mundanely trackable, would remain, stamina would be depleted and mental exhaustion would not be mended.

In short, members of the Abyss were well-advised to heal up and fix what they could while still within their barriers. That way, they didn’t have to worry about most of these things.

“So,” John turned away from the unconscious general and to Chemilia and Ted, who were both patched together already and changing into fresh clothes they had saved from one of the half-ruined buildings of the fort they were currently in. It was, according to the generals anyway, the rallying point in case of victory. “Fill me in, what happened between Imerella’s death and my arrival?”

They had some time to kill, so they might as well talk.

Ted looked to Chemilia, who was closing the buttons on her uniform with a tired but steadfast expression on her face. “The moment you contacted us with the information, me and Ted took our combined forces and decided to meet up with Terkal,” the pink-haired woman informed John. “We hadn’t yet made a resolution to fight or anything, simply deemed it best that we were together to face Abraham with the news. No offense, but we weren’t quite sure you were saying the truth.”

“I wish I hadn’t been, so I can’t blame you for that,” John nodded. That had been shortly after he got the message from Scarlett. That Abraham had kept the information from the three generals didn’t surprise John, only that his strike had only hit Imerella immediately. Likely, the forces he used to crush the opposition was an elite gathering that could only be at one point at a time. Once spread, the past few battles showed that they weren’t nearly as impressive.

“Yes…” Chemilia leaned against the wall with the shadow of grief hushing over her face. Like John and everyone else who had known and liked Imerella, she was waiting for a moment to properly stomach all of this. “…Anyway, before we could go out, Abraham brought the combined might of his forces down on Terkal’s fort. We began with defending this position, then we got your call. Eventually, they managed to break through the defences and we three made the decision to scatter over the barrier. It’s a miracle we all made it through alive.”

“Can’t say the same about much of the enemy leadership,” Metra commented with a grin, down to her usual skimpy clothes. “If I understand correctly, we got the leader of the government knight dudes, whatever they are fucking called,” the brown-skinned blonde nodded towards Aclysia, “and I murdered whatever their general was called.”

“Matthew,” Chemilia informed the ancient weapon.

“Yeah, that cunt.” Metra had way less respect for life than other people in that room, especially for the life of the enemy. Crudely aware that Abraham was probably as shocked about the loss of his nephew as they were about Imerella, John felt nauseated by the senseless loss of life in this conflict.

He really wanted to go to Imerella’s old fort and inspect the ruins himself, check Abraham’s claims and refute them with simple evidence rather than bloodshed. The president was pretty clearly guilty, this whole plan just had the convoluted handwriting of an intelligent schemer, but John owed it to his principles to at least try and look for the peaceful solution.

However, there was absolutely no way that this could still be talked out. Too many lives had been lost and the tension had been already high going into this. Also, John simply didn’t have the time to drive all the way south of DC and do extensive analysis of the rubble. Not if he wanted to be done with this war before the Lake Alliance had a chance to intervene. The winner was going to write history here.

“How did you get the information from our secret service anyway?” Chemilia asked an uncomfortable question. “If Abraham didn’t even want us to know…” her voice trailed off and waited for a response.

“…I have my ways,” John dodged poorly, but this was not his secret to disclose. Meeting Chemilia’s narrowed eyes with a pleading gaze, he eventually got her to click her tongue and wave the topic away. She would ask again later, that much John was sure of, but at least for now they had bigger worries.

“I didn’t win,” Nia suddenly dropped that line into the room. The blank was still holding both of her weapons, the black visor in front of her face, the semi-liquid void partly seeping into her white dress and staining it grey. Her shoulders were pulled back and tense, a well-hidden indicator for the fact that she was annoyed. That point eluded both Ted and Chemilia, who took an involuntary step away from the battle ready pariah.

In a just as weird and sudden act, Beatrice stepped behind Nia and began massaging the blonde’s shoulders. In her fellowly passive, if slightly more emotional (mostly irony), tone the maid commented, “Clarification: she also didn’t lose. Stalemate was achieved until enemy retreat. Other achievement: Accidental annihilation of several elementals in the vicinity of the fight and tense shoulders. I also got a headache in the process. This should be impossible.”

John wished that Beatrice hadn’t mentioned that, because now he was thinking of the reason why and his brain trying to remember that thing the passive maid had seen in the nirvana made him raise a hand to his nose rather suddenly as a drop of blood ran out, accompanied by a high pitch whistle in his ears. “Don’t talk of the… what did you call it, Nia? Nevr’est?” The blank nodded, slowly relaxing under the hands of Beatrice to the point that she at least dismissed her weapons.

“It’s right here,” Nia stated in her emotionless tone and reached out to a nearby bookshelf and gently patted the air just above the wood. As if to confirm, Nia’s ponytail made a particularly inexplicable move, jumping up from simply dangling behind her back, flying over her shoulder and settling across her chest. John’s nosebleed only got worse as he tried to comprehend the void tiger (for the lack of a better word) existing on a layer on top of the material universe. He could imagine it, but that wasn’t doing good things for his brain, especially since it was more or less confirmed.

John desperately put his thoughts elsewhere, imagining more material things. Several things sprung to mind, Abraham’s head on a pike, Rave’s ass, Eliza back in the tank with a body riddled with nails. Random, largely unpleasant images. At least his nose stopped bleeding. Aclysia handed him a handkerchief so that he could clean himself up.

“How do you even get nosebleeds?” his girlfriend wondered, looking at him with light worry. “Shouldn’t Gamer’s Body prevent that?”

“I think that the mere accurate image of a denizen of the Nirvana is enough to partly disable it,” John answered. He wasn’t getting a window to confirm any of this, which was worrying in its own right. “Just be thankful that you don’t know it, it’s really unpleasant.”

“Nevr’ests are just middle level non-existences,” Nia let John know. The Gamer wondered if these beings were classified as void elementals and if they were related to the Lorylim in any way. All he had learned so far pointed to the opposite, but one couldn’t quite help but notice that they had very clear ways to mess with normal people’s minds. “There was this one time the Great Empty One…”

“Stop!” John interrupted as he felt the veins that had just miraculously closed themselves burst again. “As much as I would love to talk to you about things you like, Nia, you have to understand that this topic is literally killing me – very slowly, but still.”

Nia closed her mouth and lowered her chin a little bit, which John guessed meant that she was feeling downtrodden. If he hadn’t been in the process of pressing a handkerchief against his nose to prevent blood from dripping on the floor, he would have hugged and kissed her. ‘I really hope that memory just fades away with time,’ John thought. ‘Randomly remembering that image and getting a nosebleed every time would suck.’

“Topic: War,” Beatrice brought them back on track. “Enemy forces now consist largely of the following factions: Remaining mercenary forces, the soldiers that survived Metra’s temper tantrums, leaderless government guards and random soldiers. Calculating in Master’s combat strength, if we attack soon, we are favourited for victory.”

A groan from the side pulled their attention over to Terkal, who was rising from Undine’s healing embrace, one hand raised to his wolf’s head. “That’s one hell of a good message to wake up to,” his voice was distorted into a permanent growl from his current shape. “Can somebody fill me in what’s going on?” His body slowly morphed back into the (naked) form of a very tall and lanky man, covered in tattoos. Very quickly, they summarized the situation while Terkal also found himself some spare clothes. By the end, the usually bashful general only wanted to know, “Why aren’t we attacking immediately?”

John was honestly surprised at the man’s calm. There had been some blooming romance between him and Imerella after all, very recent as well. The sudden loss must have hurt him the most. ‘I hate my paranoia,’ the Gamer cursed himself, immediately thinking that Terkal was hiding something in regards to the murder. Observe thankfully put that to rest, the emotions window informing John quite clearly that the lanky man was simply bottling it up for an appropriate time. He was a disciplined man, despite the lack of showing that sometimes. “We are letting the soldiers rest for a moment,” the Gamer then answered. “Also, one of my elementals died and I need to get her back.”

They didn’t need to discuss where Abraham was now. The White House was the centre of the Little Maryland government and there was no way the president would give it up. Symbolically alone it was too important but it also housed the entire bureaucratic data of the guild’s expansive territory. Every official barrier of every member organization was filed there. Whoever held it by the end of this was the winner, at least on paper.

“I see…” if Terkal had any complaints on the matter, he kept them to himself. Simply getting healed to completion, he sat broodingly in a corner of the room and kept quiet.

Giving the enemy time to prepare was a dangerous call to make. However, just marching into a defensive position of the enemy with an exhausted force also wasn’t the answer. It was a trade-off and one John had to take.

Recuperation needed to occur.